Ancient sailors drew monsters at the edges of their maps. Past the places anyone had been, the water went dark, and in the dark there were teeth. Every culture has kept some version of this. The thing out there that might be larger than you, and might not be on your side.
Most of us carry a picture of God that we did not choose. It was assembled early, out of whatever was nearby. A father who was present, or a father who was not. A teacher who was kind, or one who was frightening. A season when prayers were answered, and a season when they were not. By the time we are old enough to examine the picture, it is already hanging on the wall, and we have stopped noticing that someone else painted it.
What we believe about God decides how we live. A man who believes God is mainly watching will spend his life being careful. A man who believes God is mainly disappointed will spend his life repaying something. A man who believes God is far away will carry his troubles alone and call it maturity.
So everything turns on one thing. What is God like.
He did not send a description
God did not answer that question with a description. He came Himself.
In Jesus Christ, God has come to us. Not a messenger about God. Not a report on His character. God, in a body, in a village, in a family, with a trade. The whole New Testament rests on this. He that hath seen me hath seen the Father (John 14:9).
So the answer is not a guess, and it is not assembled from your circumstances. You look at Jesus.
And when you look, the picture on the wall begins to come down.
He touches the man with the skin disease. Nobody in the district is allowed to touch him, and Jesus reaches out first, before the healing, while the man is still unclean. He eats with people whose professions are a public scandal, and He looks like He is enjoying Himself. He is on His way to the house of an important man when a woman who has been ill twelve years takes hold of His clothes, and He stops. He weeps at a funeral He already knows how to end. He washes the feet of men who are hours away from leaving Him, and He washes the feet of the one who has already sold Him.
None of that is invented. If we were making up a God, we would make one who is impressive. The God who arrived is kind, and keeps getting too close to the wrong people.
The far country, and the arms that close
Jesus tells a story about a son in a far country.
The son is barefoot. The famine is on him. He has been feeding pigs and losing. He turns toward home with a speech worked out, and he never gets to finish it, because the father sees him while he is still a long way off. The old man has been watching the road. Then the father runs.
Men of standing in that world do not run. Running means lifting your robe, and lifting your robe is humiliation in public. The father takes the shame of the whole village into the street, at a dead sprint, to reach his son before anyone else does.
There is something underneath that story. The Son of God went into our far country. He took our humanity, shared weariness with the weary and famine with the famished, and did not separate Himself from any of it when He turned toward home. He carried us in Himself. So when the Father throws His arms around the Son, the far country is inside that embrace, and everyone the Son carried is held in those arms at once.
He is received, and we are received in Him (Ephesians 1:6).
This is what He poured Himself out to do.
Looking is the whole method
People ask what the method is. There is no technique.
A person comes to know what God is like by looking at Jesus until the old picture loses its authority. That means reading one of the four gospels slowly, as the account of a person rather than a supply of material. It means watching what He does with people who are frightened, and noticing that He is never once harsh with someone already broken. It means paying attention when He is angry, and seeing who He is angry at. It is almost always someone using God to keep someone else out.
Nothing has to be resolved first. There is no cleaning up, catching up, or arriving with the questions answered. Come and see was the first invitation anyone received in the gospels, and nobody who accepted it was asked to be ready.
The water goes quiet
At the end of the Bible there is a line a sailor would have understood at once. John describes the new creation and says that in it there is no more sea (Revelation 21:1).
The sea was not a holiday. The sea was chaos, the deep, the place the monsters came up from. No more sea means the dark water at the edge of the map is gone. The teeth are gone. The thing we have been afraid of has nowhere left to live.
That is the direction everything is moving. Not toward a reckoning we are bracing for. Toward a world where the fear underneath the other fears has no home.
Which means the picture most of us inherited was not a small mistake. It was a monster where a Father is, and it has cost people their prayers, their peace, and sometimes their faith.
He is better than you were told.
Look at Jesus. Keep looking. Let Him be the one who tells you what God is like.